hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

I don't think people itt are "excusing" those posts, just saying it's possible to be a decent person and still have bad things in your internet past. At least I hope that's true!!

not to say this makes it ok but the internet was kind of a different place in the mid 00's, virtually every "humor" site out there was couched in language like that, it was all a gross competition to see who could write the most twisted offensive shit that would "trigger" their parents. and when I go back to old Something Awful or Maddox posts that I remember used to make me laugh as a teenager I'm horrified at how blatantly awful it is. mainly cuz it's not really funny but also because I can't really find the "ironic" distance in there anymore. btw it wasn't just "edgy" humor sites, it was like...everything. Even the music sites I used to hang out on to learn about King Crimson & Genesis and shit were laden with gratuitous sexism and random slurs.

feels like a few things happened since then. one of course is people grew up and/or maybe experienced something that made these sort of gross comments feel 'real' and therefore unfunny. two was the realization that not all these people were like say Seth MacFarlane, who writes a ton of quote-unquote "ironic" shitty & offensive jokes but generally seems to be progressive "IRL", in fact a lot of these people are straight up monsters and at some point you can't really separate "ironic" racism & sexism from the real thing, which you maybe thought didn't exist in those spaces but very much does (see: Barstool). three is that people actually put names to the posts now, there's no longer that "safety net" of "who gives a shit what I post on the internet, nobody knows who I am and this'll be gone in a year anyway", even a site like ILX which seems to be one of the last bastions of the "old internet" (minus a lot of the gross shit) has a userbase where a lot of people seem to know who each other are, can't just hide behind a username like you used to

Where's my post about betting frogbs' pre-woke period is a slaughterhouse

So I'm just going to go on record here and say that I never did any of this stuff so many of you are saying 'everyone did,' and am sort of aghast at the idea that the sort of vile bullshit that I'd always tried to avoid was more embraced than I'd ever thought.

That isn't meant as a holier than thou statement or some sort of self-exoneration-- as I've mentioned, I know I've been a vile asshole at moments, as well as posted very NSFW things here and elsewhere. But few if any of my posts engaged in outright sexism, rape apology, or racism, and I feel like I'm losing my mind as people write 'everyone did this stuff.' because no, not everyone did!

Which doesn't mean that people don't deserve to have these lapses forgiven, particularly if they've changed their thoughts and behaviors accordingly...

But to me, Jordan's point about Deadspin's culture of misogyny above is part of what makes the case of Petchesky more shitty. Like, the guy clearly was engaging in violent rape culture edgelordism before he was hired as a staff writer for the site. He never should have been given a platform in the first place! And imo, he shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt now, mostly because he only apologized when he was called out, whereas much of what other posters here are pointing to was a more organic process of growing up, learning from others, and also learning that "edgy" internet culture is tied irrevocably to the worst elements of human nature, and has been since I was in middle school.

just ftr: https://adequateman.deadspin.com/casual-cruelty-1829327257

much of what other posters here are pointing to was a more organic process of growing up

well, yeah, most of us don't have editors from right-wing sites looking to make us look bad in public, of course his "process" doesn't appear "organic"

Okay. That does seem like a better response than most.

I still am amazed at I guess the 'reality' that so many embraced this cruel, shitvoid internet that was always repellent af to me. Like I remember friends showing me the racier edges of New Grounds back in middle school and not only thinking that it was disgusting, but also thinking that those friends were fucking losers. Have some of them changed? Sure. And so I guess that Petchesky has changed, as have many of you, and don't deserve my holier than thou shit just because we didn't have the same experience.

I appreciate y'all being patient with me as I think and feel through this.

you probably just matured a lot faster than people like me

fwiw I agree that rape jokes are on the extreme end and probably rarer on ILX than in almost any other online space that's been around as long

(not that we all collectively deserve a pat on the head for it or w/ever)

Why is every frogbs post like

DELETED. PLEASE STOP THIS.

Anyways I think this is why we have American fascism because everyone in my generation had this exact same experience"

fp’d

that post should be deleted

Tbf, I was a fat gay punk kid in a public middle school who got a scholarship to a fancy liberal Quaker high school, had a horrible eating disorder, and also had numerous female besties who'd survived sexual assault at some point before high school was over, so I've been pretty much like this for a long time. Don't think it has to do a lot with maturity, necessarily, but probably more to do with environment. I also hardly had a working internet connection at my house growing up.

I’m not saying frogbs is wrong in that “white guys into offensive humor have had different experiences changing with the timbre of the last 20 years.” I’m just saying his constant drumming of this as some universal/generational/zeitgeist experience is weird

congrats for stopping short of spelling out the n-word

I've posted on this message board 28,097 times and I think maybe 3 of them have been on that subject

south park is still pretty damn good (when it isn't mischaracterising trans people, its one remaining serious flaw imo) and has rowed back a lot of its y2k-era edginess, or at least moved with the times

I had a mixed experience. Even up to my mid-20s, there were people in my larger social sphere who would make “edgy” jokes, etc. Other than one guy who seems perpetually stuck in a certain cultural period, I would be completely shocked to hear that from any of them now if I had occasion to run into them socially. One in particular I can think of is a high school drama teacher that seems to be well-liked by all his students

on the other hand, a friend I got back in touch with in recent years has vented about this guy we’d gone to high school with who was very much into queer/punk/arts spaces at the time revealed himself to be a completely unironic racist years after the fact

I try to accept people for who they are now with a cautious eye to the past

Friend of Gawker Peter Thiel in the news

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-donald-trump-white-nationalist-support

you know, I realized in recent times that even if old gawker had turned into just a site with the insightful, funny articles and political content and had jettisoned the celebrity gossip stuff entirely, Thiel still would have found a lawsuit to work with his vendetta at some point. it was the one thing, but it could have been anything, or death by a thousand cuts

they printed one of the slanderous comments I submitted about my favorite NFL franchise so I'm even more in the tank for nu-Deadpsin now.

https://adequateman.deadspin.com/i-was-catfished-in-2012-and-i-took-my-anger-out-on-manti-teo-1829355555

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that's what i got when i clicked on that link

yeah sorry, it was a fake link. joke was supposed to be in the url.

A few years ago I went for a dinner with a colleague and we ended up talking about feminism, at which point I told her that in my teens I exhibited a great deal of internalized misogyny that I was in no position to really understand due to my immaturity and somewhat typical (in this regard, at least) Eastern European upbringing. She was utterly shocked and disgusted when she found out and I was just like… a) based on what we both know of teenage boys in the 90s and early 00s, what were you expecting?, b) I'm telling you this story because I'm still ashamed of my stupidity back then, and c) would it be best to never speak of this to anyone ever again and instead foster the notion that I'm a one-dimensional being whose behaviour has always been and always will be guided by the exact same ethical principles sub specie aeternitatis?

oh lol i thought it had just been spanfeller'd

No idea what that means.

that the link had been seasoned with dried leaves

Barstool - chaotic evil
Defector - chaotic good
The Ringer - lawful evil
Grantland - lawful good
The Athletic - true neutral

grantland and the ringer are more or less the same people, some of whom are great. but simmons was the same guy both places and it is, of course, not open mic night

That's why they're both lawful but Simmons has gotten worse and his influence over the site (and transition to podcast network) has gotten heavier-handed.

haven't heard about anyone killing themselves over a ringer story

lol milo otm

Mookie otm

everyone is OTM

putting aside any personal feelings i have about, the it athletic is vc funded which is a bad sign for its being at all “good”

*about it, the

also mookieproof otm

It's nice that people give enough of a fuck about sports to pay for writing about sports. If only I had made the choice as a small boy to give a fuck about sports, perhaps I would be making the big bucks as a writer today, instead of scrabbling in the gutter for nickels as a *cough, spit* music critic.

I doubt anyone outside of ESPN is making big bucks but perhaps these subscription models are allowing more sportswriters to at least make a modest living, which is admittedly a hell of a lot more than can be said for the popcrit hustle.

Athletic poached a lot of veteran sportswriters from daily newspapers and even ESPN, I don't think those guys were switching for less money

I was gonna say I figured only the writers who also
do TV and maybe pods get the big bucks but shit, they kinda all do TV and pods nowadays

I occasionally see a mention of or ad for podcasts from local newspaper people or former sports talk radio people and it seems a lot like they have listeners in the dozens.

my neighbor is a sports radio guy. the conglomerate that owns pretty much all the stations basically fired/laid off the full staff of three different stations and then un-fired most of the sports guys within a week after public outcry. I really think they had no idea what people cared about listening to, wanted to keep something and didn’t know what, and just canned everyone to see which fanbase yelled the loudest

Defector should sponsor a Chrome extension that changes deadspin to defector.com for people who still start typing it out of habit

Noticed this in a Defector story:

https://defector.com/defector-a-roaringly-successful-website-beloved-by-several-thousand-people-is-now-offering-special-holiday-gift-subscriptions/

More than 30,000 of you have purchased subscriptions to this site since it was announced, and that’s allowed us to do the work we’ve been doing.

Way upthread from Silby:

if all the contributors on that masthead become full-time employees they need like 13,000 annual subscribers at $69 a year to pay them all $50,000 a year, plus a bunch more to pay for the CMS and so on. That'd be a very high conversion rate of the erstwhile pre-ratfucking deadspin audience, but it's also not an objectively large number of customers.

So it seems like they've more than doubled this goal, and 30,000 at $69 comes out to over 2 million dollars, though the subscriber number is larger than that. Plus some subscribers are paying more than the basic $69 a year. Not bad.

and they do have ads so

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/business/media/apple-gawker-tim-cook.html

Two Gawker veterans sold the idea to Apple TV+, the new streaming service: Cord Jefferson, who left the site for a career writing for TV, and Max Read, Gawker’s former editor in chief. Apple hired two more former Gawker editors, Emma Carmichael and Leah Beckmann, as writers, and they had completed several episodes, people close to the production said.

Then, an Apple executive got an email from the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook.

Mr. Cook, according to two people briefed on the email, was surprised to learn that his company was making a show about Gawker, which had humiliated the company at various times and famously outed him, back in 2008, as gay. He expressed a distinctly negative view toward Gawker, the people said. Apple proceeded to kill the project.